In his budget statement for 2004 the Minister for Finance listed the wide range of factors that were taken into account in selecting Departments and agencies for decentralisation and the locations for the new decentralised offices. These factors include, in selecting Departments and agencies for decentralisation: the imperative that customer service standards are not adversely affected by decentralisation; the core business and nature of the relevant Departments and agencies; the location of the customer base; and the need to ensure that the units involved are large enough to provide career opportunities for staff either within their own Department or in another Department within a reasonable distance; and, in selecting locations for decentralised offices: the need to achieve a fit with the national spatial strategy in terms of the gateways and hubs and their respective catchments; the location of existing decentralised offices; the desirability of clustering a Department's decentralised units within a region; the importance of respecting the scale and character of locations in terms of their capacity to absorb the number of new jobs involved; the existence of good transport links by road, rail or air and the general infrastructural capacity in the areas selected.
My Department is already heavily decentralised and has a significant number of staff in Portlaoise which will be the location of its headquarters.